Stripe Expands in Europe, MobiKwik Raising Funds: News Roundup

In this week’s news roundup, Stripe expands and the agreements forged between PayPal and the card networks continue to deliver new features.

Leading payment facilitator Stripe said in a blog post that it has fully launched in six new European countries. Now businesses in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg have access to all of Stripe’s products.

The company said that it had worked with startups in the new countries in a preview phase, to better understand the payments of businesses there before launching.

PayPal announced the ability for users to transfer money directly into their bank accounts from eligible debit cards linked to their PayPal accounts. The feature is a result of the agreements PayPal announced with Visa and Mastercard last year.

“It’s an important milestone in the cooperation between PayPal and the networks, and it will improve PayPal’s services and probably help reduce some of PayPal’s risk and fraud losses,” Rick Oglesby, Double Diamond Group partner and principal of AZ Payments Group, tells PaymentFacilitator.com.

In an interview with The Telegraph, PayPal CEO Dan Schulman dismissed the idea that Apple Pay Cash, the tech giant’s new P2P offering, represents a threat to PayPal’s own P2P apps, because it is exclusive to Apple. He cited the “technology-agnostic” nature of PayPal’s services as their primary advantage.

According to a report in TechCrunch, Indian mobile payments provider MobiKwik is in the process of raising a new round of funding from investors – its largest to date. The round would put the value of the company at over $1 billion, crossing the unicorn threshold.

The report says that the company is confident of its ability to compete against Paytm, the number one payments provider in India, and quotes MobiKwik’s co-founder as saying that its focus on payments gives it an advantage while Paytm expands into other areas.

Shopify introduced a new channel that would enable its merchants to tag products and call Buzzfeed editors’ attention to them. The Buzzfeed channel, currently available to U.S. merchants, is intended to help them find new audiences by exposing them to consideration for Buzzfeed content.

India’s Financial Express reported that the Indian government’s push toward a cashless society does not apply to the country’s next presidential election. Candidates wishing to file their nomination for office in the 2017 election will need to bring cash.